Robin Wauters of The Next Web reports, “Seattle startup GraphLab claims it is building the ‘fastest machine-learning analytics engine for graph datasets’, based on the popular open-source distributed graph computation framework with the same name, and it has just raised capital to come through on its promise. Founded by scientists from the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley, GraphLab today announced that it has secured $6.75 million in a financing round led by Madrona and NEA.” Read more

A new panel has been added to the lineup for next week’s Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco. Incubating and Investing in Semantic Startups will give attendees the opportunity to meet entrepreneurs who have recently raised millions in venture funding for their startups. Attendees will also:

• Learn from the leader behind the technology transfer program that was the birthplace of Siri and is now incubating Tempo, Desti and Trapit.
• Learn from the experience of people responsible for evaluating startups as targets for potential investment, incubation, and/or acquisition.
• Learn about the do’s and don’ts for positioning your idea for incubation and venture for funding. Read more

David Meyer of GigaOM writes, “In the development of natural language processing, the semantic web and so on, e-commerce provides a rich breeding ground. Companies such as Amazon and Google always want to find better ways to learn what it is potential customers are looking for, so the technology follows the commercial imperative. A Berlin startup called Versus IO is trying to apply natural language algorithms in its product comparison service, and it’s just closed a $2.8 million Series A round to do so. The round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital and also includes Dave McClure, who previously invested $100,000, and angels Lars Dittrich and Dario Suter.” Read more

Avishay Bassa of Newsgeek (translation by TheNextWeb) recently wrote, “Israeli start-up Symbolab, developer of a unique, mathematically geared search engine that can find and solve for complex mathematical equations, announced today the completion of a seed round of $1.2 million. The round was funded by several angels, including Michael Queen – former CEO of Harel Finance and Sprint Investment House, as well as other angels from the UK investment world. CEO, Michal Avny said, in an interview with Newsgeek, that the money raised in the current funding round will be used for further R&D of their technology, as well as to help finance the launch of a mobile application for smartphones and tablets in the near future.” Read more

Don Clark of the Wall Street Journal writes, “Big data has become one of tech’s biggest buzz phrases, despite varying definitions about what it really is. But the financial bets being placed are pretty substantial, with Skytree emerging as the latest example. The Silicon Valley startup on Tuesday is announcing it has raised $18 million in Series A funding, a fairly hefty amount these days for an early-stage software company with less than 20 employees. U.S. Venture Partners, a venerable name in the venture-capital world, led the round. Scott McNealy, the former chief executive of Sun Microsystems, is also participating.” Read more

Ryan Lawler of Tech Crunch reports, “Infer has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures, with other investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Social+Capital Partnership, Sutter Hill Ventures, and individual angels including Pejman Nozad. Along with the funding, Redpoint partner Satish Dharmaraj joined the Infer board. The platform works by ingesting all sorts of corporate sales data from various CRMs and other sales and marketing databases, and combines that proprietary internal data with various signals available on the web. Read more

Kitware is pleased to announce the award of $149,983 in Phase I SBIR funding from the U.S. Army for the development of an adaptive healthcare exchange language [learn more about this at SemTechBiz] for interaction between patients and healthcare organizations. With the proposed system in place, the flow of healthcare information and knowledge between patients, healthcare providers, and researchers will be dramatically improved, facilitating better care; personalized, evidence-based medicine; and longitudinal research yielding medical breakthroughs. Read more

Anthony Ha of Tech Crunch reports, “Sherpa, a personal assistant app that launched initially in the Spanish-speaking world, just announced that it has raised $1.7 million in funding from undisclosed angel investors. Sherpa users can speak or type their requests, and the app answers them by collecting information from around the web. The company has also partnered with PayPal and other services, so that users accomplish tasks like making travel reservations and transferring money.”

Ha continues, “The technology was developed by founder and CEO Xabier Uribe-Etxebarria. He actually stopped by the TechCrunch office last fall to show off the app and to compare the results to what you would find in Siri and in Wolfram Alpha. There were, in fact, a number of cases where he’d asked some factual questions and get more complete and relevant answers from Sherpa than the competition. (To be clear, that was a pretty limited test. Read more

Arkami™, Inc. today announced new members to the Advisory Board (list below) to provide valuable perspective on the introduction of myIDkey™, the industry’s first biometric fingerprint, Bluetooth wireless / USB key. Building off the successful Kickstarter launch, the board brings strategic counsel to the executive team in the areas of business development, market trends and technology leadership as the product gets set to launch later this year. Read more

Sophia Search, the Belfast-based innovation leader in semantic content analysis, Chaired by industry veteran Chris Horn, today announced that it has closed a $3.7 million Series A funding round. The investment was led by Atlantic Bridge, and will be used to increase marketing and sales efforts in North America and the UK and to accelerate product roll-out at its development facility at the Northern Ireland Science Park. This financing round represents one of the largest venture investments in a Northern Ireland company in recent times. Read more